Over her 30-year career as a certified teacher, researcher, and university teacher educator, the author has planned, facilitated and refined educational experiences for children from pre-kindergarten through adolescence, as well as for adults who teach (or were preparing to teach) in New York, Connecticut, Texas, and Arizona. During the summer of 2008, she served in Italy as a member of Volunteers for Peace, an international non-profit global immersion program directed towards arts, education, and cultural exchange. She was assigned to Barra, an economically disadvantaged area southeast of Naples. Despite her advanced degree, she was considered an adult "counselor" during the summer. With her professional background, she assumed that she would be mentoring older students, but found that her assignment was to support a lead teacher in her work with 24 young children. After a few days, she resigned herself to the "learner's seat," a position to which she was not accustomed. From this vantage, she realized how advanced the thinking of the four and five years olds under her care appeared to be. The pre-schoolers seemed to believe that they were charged with re-educating her, a middle-aged career teacher, professor of education, and mother of two grown children. As the weeks progressed, she began to perceive ways that these children were using their innate thinking skills to achieve, create, communicate, negotiate, and formulate decisions. She wrote up eight realizations, which is discussed in this article, hoping that these observations, vignettes, and tips (or suggestions) might be of use to other educators. These are: (1) Kids think like economists; (2) Kids think like lawyers; (3) Kids think like strategists; (4) Kids think like kids; (5) Kids think like keepers of the culture; (6) Kids think like pragmatists; (7) Kids think like artists; and (8) Kids think like global citizens. (Contains 3 notes.)